Rabies in human beings is always fatal. The commonest source of human infection is the domestic dog, which in turn is infected by wild carnivorous animals. As a result of the widespread outbreak of rabies in recent years in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas there have been demands for wholesale slaughter of certain wild animals. The recently published fifth report of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Expert Committee on Rabies recommends control of certain vector species. The danger, as Michael Woodford points out in this assessment of the report, is that the methods used will almost certainly involve the killing of other harmless wildlife.

In the summer of 1966 Dr Kaszab, Director of the Zoological Department of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, was invited by the Mongolian and Hungarian Academies of Science to lead an expedition, his fourth, to western Mongolia, in the course of which the members had the good fortune to sight eight Przewalski wild horses.

Aldabra, one of the few islands left in the world with a distinctive fauna undisturbed by man, is threatened with the installation of an air base and a radio station that would without doubt ruin its scientific value and probably exterminate several rare, and some unique, birds. The author, a member of die Bristol University Seychelles Expedition of 1964–65, spent two months on Aldabra, which lies 630 miles south-west of Seychelles and 230 miles northwest of Madagascar. He describes some of the interesting animals and birds and the unique opportunity for scientific study that the island offers, and points to Assumption Island as a “grim warning” of what human interference can do to such an island.

The two animals most seriously threatened by development in the Malay peninsula are the Sumatran rhinoceros and the seladang. The author, who has extensive knowledge of the peninsula, puts the rhinos at ten known individuals, with a probable total population of thirty, but many areas are still unexplored and information is far from complete. The seladang or Malayan gaur, the huge wild ox standing as high as six feet at the shoulder, is even more vulnerable than the rhino. Seladang unfortunately prefer habitats that are suitable for cultivation, and since the war some herds of thirty or more animals have completely disappeared. Two projected dams, which will destroy the greatest concentration of salt licks in Malaya, are a new and serious threat to the seladang.

The Government is unaware of the value of wild animals; the people mostly regard them as inferior sorts of cow to be eaten or got rid of; the Game Department struggles to guard them with inadequate staff: what should be done? The author, a zoologist who has spent three years at the University of Khartoum, surveys the situation, comments on the recommendations in the Fraser Darling Report, and concludes that, if the Sudan is to become one of the principal game countries in Africa, as it should be, some at least of these recommendations must be implemented in the next five to ten years.